There is also a hard luck story, involving a claim that was correct but was retracted. There were many people who made claims in the 70s and 80s or earlier that proved to be wrong. That led to a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019. Yes, the first discovery was in 1995, by a Swiss pair, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz.
“Exoplanet hunting was a field of broken dreams for much of the twentieth century,” you write in your book. What most people don’t realize is that all the exoplanets we’ve found are in our backyard they’re really quite close in our galaxy.Īlso, I’m not sure everybody appreciates how recently it was that we saw the first one. Mostly in my research, if it’s less than a billion light years away, I don’t care. I came to astrobiology and exoplanets a little later in my career, just because the field was so exciting. I should preface all this by saying I’m a cosmologist by training.
It could be a Jupiter-type planet, a Mars-type planet or an Earth-type planet, and anything in between. An exoplanet is just any planet orbiting a star other than the Sun.
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